New Services Contract Will Keep The Royal Navy Ship Shape

Portsmouth, Unit­ed King­dom: BAE Sys­tems has won a five year con­tract to pro­vide infor­ma­tion ser­vices vital to the suc­cess­ful oper­a­tion of the entire sur­face fleet for the Roy­al Navy and Roy­al Fleet Aux­il­iary in Portsmouth.

Con­fig­u­ra­tion Account­ing Ser­vices

The Con­fig­u­ra­tion Account­ing Ser­vice involves the man­age­ment of a huge cen­tral infor­ma­tion sys­tem, known as the Sur­face Ship Def­i­n­i­tion Data­base, which con­tains over five mil­lion records relat­ing to Roy­al Navy ships.

The company’s engi­neers work tire­less­ly to ensure all data, includ­ing tech­ni­cal doc­u­ments, design change guid­ance and spares lists for each ship, are accu­rate, up to date and eas­i­ly acces­si­ble. Cru­cial­ly, this infor­ma­tion is required to coor­di­nate all main­te­nance, repairs and upgrades to the fleet effec­tive­ly.

Ian Booth, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor, Sup­port at BAE Sys­tems’ Sur­face Ships busi­ness, said: “Rapid and accu­rate data exchange helps us to meet the demand for increased effi­cien­cies and cost sav­ings in deliv­er­ing sup­port to the Roy­al Navy’s sur­face fleet in the cur­rent chal­leng­ing envi­ron­ment. Our engi­neers main­tain the sys­tem, bring­ing togeth­er and stor­ing data in one place, ensur­ing that the Roy­al Navy can access infor­ma­tion at the right time, help­ing to speed up the process for repairs and upgrades and bet­ter sup­port each ship’s indi­vid­ual require­ments.”

Cdr Chris New, Head of Mar­itime Main­te­nance Sup­port group at Abbey Wood, said: “Con­fig­u­ra­tion account­ing is a key part of deliv­er­ing main­te­nance and sup­port to the sur­face fleet. The knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence that the BAE Sys­tems team bring will ensure that key sub­ject mat­ter exper­tise will remain avail­able with­in the mar­itime domain to sup­port the cur­rent, and future devel­op­ments in sur­face ship sup­port arrange­ments.”

The team also works to cap­ture tech­ni­cal data from new ships under con­struc­tion, such as the Queen Eliz­a­beth Class air­craft car­ri­ers and Type 45 destroy­ers, feed­ing this into the cen­tral infor­ma­tion sys­tem. This is a key ele­ment of knowl­edge shar­ing through the life­cy­cle of a ship, help­ing to ensure BAE Sys­tems engi­neers can pro­vide effec­tive in ser­vice sup­port to these ships as they become oper­a­tional with the Roy­al Navy.

The Con­fig­u­ra­tion Account­ing Ser­vice is part of the company’s Mas­ter Record Data Cen­tre based at the busi­ness’ facil­i­ty at Portsmouth Naval Base. The con­tract will come into effect in Decem­ber 2011 and fol­lows on from a pre­vi­ous agree­ment which has seen the com­pa­ny deliv­er sim­i­lar ser­vices to the Roy­al Navy over the past 17 years, ensur­ing that con­sis­ten­cy of the sys­tem is main­tained.

Work­ing side by side with the Roy­al Navy at Portsmouth Naval Base, through a part­ner­ing rela­tion­ship known as Team Portsmouth, BAE Sys­tems pro­vides sup­port to naval base infra­struc­ture, as well as deliv­er­ing engi­neer­ing and war­ship avail­abil­i­ty ser­vices to max­imise oper­a­tional capa­bil­i­ty of the Roy­al Navy’s sur­face fleet.